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Popping in quickly to share one of my all-time favorite poems (introduced to me by a fellow blogger last year!). We just began our poetry unit in school and it’s been a huge success. I’ll blog more about that later!

Each year I begin by giving each of my students a packet of poems. They are all by “cool” poets, I tell them- Walter Dean Myers, Valerie Worth, Eloise Greenfield, Jack Prelutsky, and many more. My favorite is the last poem in the packet, by Kate DiCamillo.

Snow, Aldo

By Kate DiCamillo

Once, I was in New York,
in Central Park, and I saw
an old man in a black overcoat walking
a black dog. This was springtime
and the trees were still
bare and the sky was
gray and low and it began, suddenly,
to snow:
big fat flakes
that twirled and landed on the
black of the man’s overcoat and
the black dog’s fur. The dog
lifted his face and stared
up at the sky. The man looked
up, too. “Snow, Aldo,” he said to the dog,
“snow.” And he laughed.
The dog looked
at him and wagged his tail.

If I was in charge of making
snow globes, this is what I would put inside:
the old man in the black overcoat,
the black dog,
two friends with their faces turned up to the sky
as if they were receiving a blessing,
as if they were being blessed together
by something
as simple as snow
in March.

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Jack Prelutsky! He was my favorite poet when I was a kid. Everybody else thought Shel Silverstein was sooooooo cool and didn’t even know who he was… Jack had much more of a Calvin and Hobbes vibe, which is probably why I was such a fan…